02.05.2023 •

Subscribers at SFF

To honour SFF’s community origins, the Living Archive contains an oral history of Sydney Film Festival through the anecdotes of the historic community of SFF subscribers, whose memories of the Festival over the last seven decades have deepened the rich history of the Festival.

Sydney Film Festival was created with the intention of bringing together a community of film enthusiasts through a shared experience, and to introduce audiences in Sydney to the wonders of cinema. The early years of the festival successfully took shape through the power of sheer determination, community collaboration and a love of film. Over time, this community has grown, cinema has evolved and SFF has expanded, but the Festival continues with the same spirit of community.

Until the introduction of individual tickets and passes in 2000, the Festival functioned on a subscription model, which meant the audience was made up entirely of loyal subscribers who bought tickets for the entire program. The introduction of single tickets made the Festival more accessible, opening it up to a wider audience. But the dedicated subscribers, volunteers, former committee members, staff and SFF alumni who organised, attended and animated the Festival each year since 1954 remain at the very heart of SFF.

The community of Sydney Film Festival subscribers have been devoted since the very beginning. The promise of a festival offering something other than Hollywood cinema was so intriguing for some that one subscriber – Barrie Brown – took a 15-hour overnight steam train to the 1956 Festival, beginning a longstanding membership and association with SFF.

Festival veteran Richard Keys remembers the energy of the first Festival, and the devotion of its attendees: “I attended the first SFF at Sydney University in 1954 as a schoolboy with my mother. There were no age restrictions then. The program was one folded sheet. Some years ago I found one in my papers and donated it to the Festival. There was a certain amount of chaos, as subscribers rushed from one venue to the other between sessions. The conditions were challenging – the seats in the Teachers College were designed to take only one buttock at a time! A couple of years later there was a challenge of a different kind – the print of The Seven Samurai arrived with only Japanese writing on it. The poor projectionist did his best, but the reels were screened out of order, and samurai and bandits kept dying and getting resurrected.”

David Bruce-Steer, who has been a regular attendee of the Festival since 1969 – only missing one and a half Festivals – shared: “One of my enduring memories is watching a screening of an Italian film at Rose Bay in the early 70’s. The film had arrived, but it was unsubtitled, but luckily the Director had an English translation of the script. So there we were in the great Wintergarden, listening to the mellifluous honeyed voice of David Stratton reading the dialogue of the male actors and an unremembered lady reading the female voices. Luckily the film was fairly short.”

Another lifelong subscriber, Deb Sander, shared: “I have been attending the SFF since 1976. One [year] a film had peasants burning at the stake with a real vividness that was quite shocking. The film suddenly took on an authenticity no-one ever imagined as the smell of smoke filled the stalls at the State Theatre. Next, a group of firemen rushed down the aisle towards the air conditioning unit, which had started to burn. The film was still showing burning peasants as the fireman extinguished the fire. What synergy!”

Film festivals are ephemeral by nature, they unfold in a brief, concentrated moment in time, with each year’s program documenting the filmic zeitgeist. But at the centre of all festivals is the community of festivalgoers and filmmakers, as well as the experience they share as an audience. Festivals live on in the personal experiences of subscribers and the stories held in festival ephemera, preserved by festival goers in memory of their attendance. The Living Archive would not be possible without the historic community of SFF subscribers, whose item donations ­and stories alike will make for a valuable resource to be used by SFF audiences, Festival programmers, staff and researchers, now and in future.

Although film festivals are now held all over the world, SFF was one of the first; a locally inspired event created to introduce the public to other worlds through otherwise inaccessible films and bring Sydney’s cinephiles together through a shared love of cinema, in an environment where they could exchange ideas.

Listen to our our short oral history series featuring interviews with some of our long-time festival subscribers, recorded at the State Theatre during the 2022 Sydney Film Festival.

71 years of cinema, conversation and community

We acknowledge Australia’s First Nations People as the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land, and pay respect to the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, upon whose Country SFF are based.

We honour the storytelling and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia.

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